Novena: A leather-bound open-source hacker laptop that you can build yourself

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The beautiful laptop that you see before you, called Project Novena, was built from scratch. Because its creators have open-sourced the laptop’s blueprints, you can even build a Novena yourself — if you had a lot of time, money, and technical expertise, anyway. In keeping with the laptop’s open computing roots, even the motherboard was designed and created from scratch. Inside the laptop, which was created specifically for hardware hacking, there’s a whole range of goodies: an FPGA on the motherboard, dual Ethernet sockets, a USB OTG port — and again, due to the open-source requirement, a Freescale iMX6 quad-core ARM CPU. The build took more than a year and a half to complete.

Built by Sean “xobs” Cross and Bunnie Huang, Project Novena is truly a wonder to behold. We’ve seen a lot of DIY desktops and case mods, but laptops — because of their smaller form factor and non-standard parts — are very rare indeed. Open source DIY laptops are almost unheard of. In this case, “open source” means two things: The blueprints for the custom circuit boards (the motherboard and battery board) are available on the Project Novena wiki, and where possible Xobs and Bunnie tried to use components that had complete and NDA-free documentation. That’s why they chose the Freescale iMX6 CPU — unlike most CPUs, you can simply hit up the Freescale website and download an almost-complete 6,000-page programming manual. If you wanted to get your hands on Intel’s internal documentation, you would need to sign a lot of paperwork. (Read: GoFlow: a DIY tDCS brain-boosting kit.)

The custom-made Project Novena laptop, with labels

Here’s how Novena’s hardware specs break down: A quad-core Freescale iMX6 (Cortex-A9) ARM CPU, Vivante GC2000 GPU (one of the few parts requiring a non-open-source binary), a Micro SD slot that the system boots from, one DDR3 SODIMM RAM slot, a mini-PCIe slot, and an mPCIx slot for mobile data cards. Because this laptop was created specifically for hardware hacking, there are more ports and connectors and controllers than you can ever imagine. On the motherboard there are: Internal speaker connectors, a built-in microphone, a three-axis accelerometer, a header for a WiFi module, a HDMI socket, SD card reader, USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and standard 100Mbps Ethernet, USB OTG (on-the-go), and a Xilinx Spartan-6 CSG324 FPGA with high-speed I/O expansion header for doing… well, just about anything.

Battery-wise, a separate daughtercard is used, allowing for standard RC-enthusiast lithium-polymer battery packs to be plugged in. These batteries are designed to be quick-charging (no one likes waiting hours for their RC car or quadcopter to recharge), allowing for 7-8 hours of run-time from a 1-hour charge on a 45 watt-hour battery. Due to the flexible interface, though, you could happily swap-in a 100 watt-hour battery if you so wished (and keep spare batteries in your bag, ready to go). [See: Facebook, ARM, x86, and the future of open computing.]

Leather-bound Novena laptops. Red sheepskin, and green pig suede.

Finally, there’s a 13-inch 2560×1700 (239 ppi) display (which can be switched out for something else if you prefer), a standard laptop keyboard (with a nipple; no touchpad), an aluminium alloy frame (light and strong), paper laminate for interior structure, and — the best bit — the outside of the laptop is wrapped in genuine leather. “I love that my laptop smells of leather when it runs,” says Bunnie. The laptop, of course, runs Linux.

Bunnie and Xobs don’t give an exact cost for their prototype laptops, but I’d estimate that they cost at least $1,500 each — probably more, once you factor in the FPGA, and the cost of having the logic boards manufactured. Consider that it cost over a year and a half of their time, too (though, now that they’ve done the hard work and open-sourced the blueprints, it would take you a lot less time to make your own). You may also be interested to hear that, following a lot of praise from hackers, Bunnie and Xobs are planning to build and sell a simplified version of Novena via a crowdfunding campaign. We’ll keep you updated.

the fpga will probably be around 15(lx9) up to 60€(lx 45) its at 45nm if i remember it right.

Naipier

Nice

Dozerman

From my understanding, FPGAs are very specific with what they can accomplish (lying in the middle ground between ASICs and fully-programmable CPUs. If that’s the case, what specific purpose does this FPGA perform?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

No, ASICs are very specific. FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) can be reprogrammed with software. It’s like having a reprogrammable (and thus slower) ASIC. But it’s faster than a CPU for the task that it’s been programmed for.

Dozerman

Thanks for clearing that up. I was thinking that they could be programmed for a specific set of tasks that they were made for, but what you said makes more sense.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

No problem.

FPGAs are mostly used for testing, development, hacking, etc. Before you try out some new fetch/decode unit in a new Intel CPU, they would model it on an FPGA to see how it performs. That kind of stuff.

Dozerman

Seems like they would make great addon cards to accelerate specific tasks on-the-fly (actually, I think those are called graphics cards and GPGPU ).

java lu

FPGA is the in between solution. It is some what flexible yet fast.

massau

you can compare the FPGA to a low clocked super fast parallel processor or a “temporary single purpose processor”. But it is much harder to program and not all algorithms can be implemented it hardware.
-I have implemented a digital clock whit vga output,
-a soc (picoblaze + vga output) for a digital clock
-wishbone bus each
one takes a lot of time to make.

So if you have a large enough FPGA than you could load it whit a HVEC coder and it will be a lot faster than a GPU/CPU but it will be slower than an ASIC. if you are don dooing the HVEC you reprogram it to something else.
But the reprogramming also takes time. There is some research in partially dynamical reprogramming so the FPGA reprograms so it fits best for the task.

Heath Parsons

$1500 isn’t worth having a desk that messy ;)

Heath Parsons

$1500 isn’t worth having a desk that messy ;)

Heath Parsons

$1500 isn’t worth having a desk that messy ;)

SirGCal

I like the idea of self-built laptops. Always hated having to buy something already built. But my first thought, if those are speakers on the left palm, I couldn’t type with them there… Perhaps just me. The rest of it seems to have stuff I might not need. Still the cost of having stuff built custom wouldn’t be cheap. I’m waiting for basically the laptop you can just order the parts you want and put them together like desktop units. There was a few attempts at this but they tended to be too expensive. If they would just standardize… But then they’d lose their cash so I guess that won’t happen soon… /sigh

Jon de la Motte

“The beautiful laptop that you see before you…”

Nope. That’s not the adjective that came to mind.

iliketurtlez

I wish they would sell a separate controller board for that Chromebook Pixel screen they’re using. You can buy those screens all over the place for about $60, but there’s no way to interface it. I’d like to connect 3 or 4 of them up to my normal desktop computer.

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